The first performance of Pop-Up Magazine’s spring 2019 issue show was at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Friday, May 10. This, the third such show that I’d seen, made the best use of a startling array of stories and what seemed to be the most naturally integrated elements: music (by Minna Choi’s Magik*Magik Orchestra), photos and graphics that moved each story along.

In an evening of high points, it’s hard to pick the highest, but I won’t forget DeniseZmekhol’s “Skin of Glass,” a fragment of a documentary she’s working on about a Sao Paulo skyscraper that was her architect father’s masterpiece. The piece was both a love letter to her father and a horror story about urban poverty and economic disaster. I knew little about Brazil, less about Sao Paulo. But listening to this unfold, I was a child at bedtime, magically transported to a time and place that seemed at once foreign and familiar.

On Mother’s Day, two mothers, a friend and I, attended Susan Lieu’s monologue, “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother,” which was presented by CAAMFest. Lieu is in her early 30s; her parents came to the United States after the Vietnam War, and they made their living in two nail salons.